Sixteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Limited focus has been given to potential gendered effects of country-level labor market regulation on entrepreneurship. This study investigates the extent to which flexibility in the regulations of employment matters for entrepreneurial activity under a gender perspective. We conduct a panel data analysis for 83 countries during the period 2004-2018 by differentiating between developed and developing economies. Our results highlight that, while in high-income countries the effects of labor regulation on gendered entrepreneurship are insignificant, in the developing countries labor flexibility seems to be closely associated with female entrepreneurship, so that more flexible labor regulation is related to lower female early-stage entrepreneurial activity, even though this relationship tends to be reversed as the level of economic development of the country is higher. The findings highlight how potential reform of labor market institutions, particularly in the developing world, may entail considerable implications in terms of gendered entrepreneurship, and consequently in the progress towards gender equality and empowerment of women.